Women and Development in Africa: How Gender Works This book is intended for anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and economists who teach development studies or gender studies, to use in the classroom, for upper-division undergraduate or Master’s level courses. It offers a synthesis and interpretation of relevant topics, theories and empirical findings. The book is multi-disciplinary. The book is published by Lynne Rienner Publishers, January 2004. The 2nd edition will be out in Fall 2014. Available on amazon.com.

Academic Articles (In reverse chronological order of publication. Note, many links here are to pre-published working paper versions of the papers. Published versions may vary. Please consult the published version.)

“Community based targeting for social safety nets” (with Jonathan Conning of Williams College). A survey of the literature on decentralizing welfare programs and devolving authority to communities. This paper has been printed as a World Bank Social Protection Unit discussion paper, and appeared in World Development 2002, Vol 30, No. 3, pp. 375-94.

“Social Norms and the Time Allocation of Women’s Labor in Burkina Faso” (co-authored with Bruce Wydick, USF) Uses data on time allocation to argue that social norms are more restrictive for Mossi women than for Bwa women in a village in Burkina. The general point is that social norms may be strong influences on economic activity. Review of Development Economics, v5, n 1, pp. 119-29, Feb. 2001. Here is the appendix that goes with the final version.

“Evolving Tenure Rights and Agricultural Intensification in Southwestern Burkina Faso” Co-authored with Leslie Gray. We argue that there is little empirical evidence of tenure insecurity leading to land degradation using data from a three-village study. Farmers, rather, are intensifying production in ways that make agriculture more sustainable. We concentrate specifically on the different status and incentives facing Mossi and Bwa farmers, the main ethnic groups living in the region. World Development Volume 29, Issue 4 , April 2001, Pages 573-587.

“Microenterprise Lending to Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth for Poverty Reduction?” (co-authored with Bruce Wydick, USF) World Development Volume 29, Issue 7 , July 2001, Pages 1225-1236. Using data from a microenterprise lending program in Guatemala, we show that, controlling for a host of other factors, while women’s businesses are smaller than those of men, there is little significant difference in their rate of expansion upon being provided better access to credit. An exception is that female entrepreneurs in childbearing years show significantly lower rates of employment generation in enterprises than male entrepreneurs.

“Diminished Access, Diverted Exclusion” Review of processes through which women in Africa are losing and gaining land. Published in African Studies Review. An earlier, longer version is called Land Tenure Status of African Women and is a comprehensive review of the literature, arguing that must focus on incidence of exercise of land rights, rather than just forms and nature of rights.

“‘A Woman’s Field Is Made At Night’: Gendered Land Rights and Norms in Burkina Faso” Argues that gendered rights to land are far more complex than usually imagined, are evolving in unexpected ways, and are responding to government interventions in ways other than intended. This gendering of land rights has implications for tests of household efficiency. Published in Feminist Economics. Reprinted in ‘Gender and Development’, edited by Janet Momsen, Routledge, 2008, as Ch39, in Vol.III pp. 82-107.

“Burkina Faso” in Countries at the Crossroads 2007, Freedom House. This chapter reviews to political situation in Burkina Faso from a civic liberties and democracy perspective, for the years 2005 and 2006. I scored Burkina somewhat higher than the previous “rater”, Prof. Augustin Loada, primarily because on many dimensions the government improved, and on only a few were there salient moves away from increased liberty.

“Notes on Sweatshop Labor” These are notes on the sweatshop labor issue that I use for teaching and lecturing. A slightly more polished version was included in a book on sweatshops: “Sweatshops: Ethical Aspects”, in Sweatshops, editor Sumathi Reddy, Hyderabad: The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India University Press, 2006, pp. 21-34.

“Why is there not more financial intermediation in developing countries?” Jonathan Conning and I wrote this follow-up paper to our earlier paper on community based targeting. This explores the role more generally of intermediaries in deepening financial institutions. Appeared in a volume edited by Stefan Derçon for Oxford University Press, entitled Insurance Against Poverty, pp. 330-60, 2004.

“Sudan 2001-2002” This is a chapter for the reference work African Contemporary Record Vol. 28 2001-2002 (pp. B662-685). Teaneck, NJ: Africana Publishing Company, Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., and summarizes and interprets events in Sudan over the two year period.

“Résultats préliminaires d’une enquête sur la lecture à Ouagadougou” (with Alain Sissao). This short paper that appeared in the Burkinabè publication Espace Scientifique in 2005 and deals with some methodological issues regarding our survey instrument after a pre-test of our questionnaire on reading habits in Burkina Faso. Of interest primarily to students and Francophone researchers in West Africa. A copy of our final questionnaire and reading test (in French) is available here.

“The Work of the Civilian Protection Monitoring Unit in Sudan” Sudan Studies Association Newsletter, 2004. This is a short note explaining the work and presenting a compilation of statistics on the results of the investigations of the CPMT.

“Understanding Sudan” (A short article commissioned as teaching material for the DVD edition of the documentary, Lost Boys of Sudan, that premiered on PBS in the Fall 2004.) October 2004.

“Marriage in Africa: simple economics” Drawing on significant anthropological literature, this article addresses a wide variety of questions related to marriage in Africa. The article argues that the institution of marriage can be understood as an economic phenomenon. Appeared in The Ahfad Journal, December, 2002, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 24-41.

Interview with Deborah Scroggins, author of “Emma’s War: An Aid Worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil–A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan.” in Sudan Studies Association Newsletter, Vol. 22, no. 1, 2003.

The changing status of daughters in Indonesia (with David Levine from U.C. Berkeley), 2000. Uses data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey to show the remarkable relative equality in treatment of girls and boys in Indonesia (except in education, and even there the gap has narrowed to become almost non-existent). Although this relative equality is well-known, we had not seen any papers that documented it over as many indicators and over as much time (using recall data back to the 1940s). Prompts the question: Why is Indonesia so different from India and China in the treatment of daughters? But the paper was rejected three times. So…

The Emergence of Land Markets in Africa (Washington, DC, Resources for the Future, 2009) by Stein Holden, Keijiro Otsuka and Frank Place, eds. appeared in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2011, 59(3):686-9.